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Concentrate on your customers; leave security for the third party

December 7, 2008

A YouGov survey, commissioned by the British Chambers of Commerce and Microsoft last year had come up with some interesting findings.

Among other things, the survey had revealed that while SMBs in the UK — as elsewhere in the world — have made significant improvements in the way they have begun to use the internet technology; they are still far from tapping the full potential of the new tools through business process outsourcing.

Earlier while IT was only used for routine accounting and book keeping functions, these days it’s also being effectively used for customer and supplier interaction, yet, some 85% SMBs surveyed in the Microsoft research said that accounting was still one of the main activities carried out on their computers.
So while 82% of SMBs surveyed appeared to have embraced the internet and had a web presence, they were still spending a good deal of their time on tasks that cannot be considered a priority and can easily be outsourced to third party vendors, who can do it for lesser cost and better!
For instance, instead of devoting time to client management and customer service, these SMB owners were found bogged down by tasks related to data recovery, cutting red tape, and fixing IT problems related to security and data storage.

Outsource IT Security
All this led researchers to reach the following conclusions:
• IT security failures cost SMBs an estimated 1,259 pounds per annum
• While 82% of small businesses surveyed had a web presence, less than a third of them were using it to trade, indicating an under tapping of the e-commerce possibility
• At least a fifth of businesses were not using their PCs to maintain client and supplier databases. This despite the fact that a majority of these SMBs admitted that it was their personalized approach to customer service that set them apart from their competitors. Instead they were engaged in routine administrative tasks!
The bottom line is that although a lot of SMBs have begun to understand the value that IT can deliver, they are still not using the full potential of the medium by farming out all their non-core activities and by concentrating only on their core!


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Comments

One Response to “Concentrate on your customers; leave security for the third party”

  1. Anderson on December 17th, 2008 4:43 pm

    With the latest tools and technologies offshore companies can mange and troubleshoot all the IT security for small businesses. For example, all the anti virus software companies have started proving remote monitoring and automatic update for the software for both home and corporate customers. In the same way with the right set of tools, small businesses can outsource their IT security to other companies. However, the main problem is “Trust”, not sure how small businesses can trust other companies located in offshore locations.

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